Walter Cronkite Says that Iraq and Vietnam are the same [View All]

[ECH1969]

CRONKITE: And my story coming out, Tet Offensive, saying that we ought to get out of there was a highlight of my career certainly, a very important highlight.

SMITH: Well, makes me want to ask you about coverage of this war, of the Iraq War, because people try to make comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq.

CRONKITE: I think the comparison is almost exact.

SMITH: You do?

CRONKITE: Yes, I do. I do. I don’t think… I think we made a mistake in getting into that war, even as we made a mistake in getting into the Vietnam War. John Kennedy did that to us, originally, and then Lyndon Johnson did his best with it. But he inherited it, and he had a difficult time getting us out of it. He did his best. This war is the same thing precisely. We shouldn’t have gone in there. We got in by mistake. We got in thinking we could do something for democracy, save a democracy. Same thing we were saying, Kennedy said, for Vietnam, we were saying for the Middle East.

SMITH: Yeah.

CRONKITE: And that we were in danger, and we had to save democracy. They didn’t have any democracy, just like they didn’t have in in the Far East. Vietnam was a monarchy, and a very mean one. And much the same. Of course, we knew that we were getting that kind of situation in Asia. I mean, in the Mideast.

SMITH: Yes.

CRONKITE: But we didn’t know the full extent of it. We thought we could create the liberties of a democracy there. A sad mistake, of course.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/texasmonthlytalks/transcripts/cronkite